Weekend Hodgepodge – Cigar Rights of America

I enjoy a fine cigar every now and again. With that being said I find it very interesting the parallels between the right to keep and bear arms and the right, yes I said right, to enjoy a fine cigar. I like to put cigar smoking in that whole pursuit of happiness thing.

To wit: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

How I choose to pursue my happiness should be be my own business and so long as it isn’t hurting another person directly so should it stay. So yes, you want to ban me from smoking a stogie in the new born wing at the hospital, fine. You want to ban me from being able to smoke one on my 100 acre ranch? To hell with that.

Of course, just like with gun owners having to fight for their rights against gun control zealots, so now must cigar aficionado’s defend themselves from nanny state ninnies who wish to regulate and control every aspect of a persons life because for some reason, the NANNY STATE somehow in its unending wisdom (note sarcasm) knows how we should all live our lives and won’t let a little thing like liberty get in the way of their control.

The tactics for both gun grabbers and nanny staters are similar in this situation. Regulate the hell out of the industry until it becomes too difficult and expensive to thrive. Fortunately for the Second Amendment, we have been able to stymie a lot of the serious damage that gun control zealots would like to inflict. Damage that would be brought on by measures such as bankrupting gun manufacturers and dealers by allowing frivolous litigation against them for crimes done by their product. It would be like suing a car company because a drunk driver hit you. It’s ridiculous.

But even the defenders of the Second Amendment must still be wary of bankrupting schemes such asmicro stamping and the like. Non working technology that gun grabbing zealots would like to levy with the knowledge that it would be near impossible to employ.

The cigar industry is facing a similar attack but it doesn’t get as much play since, as I stated earlier, there is no cigar amendment to stand behind. I hypothesize that the reason for this is that if the Founding Fathers had any clue that our government would get so screwed up in the 200+ years since it was formed that we would NEED amendments to protect things like the ability to travel (flying without giving up your 4 Amendment rights to the TSA or the bureaucracy of the DMV) or the ability to indulge in vices (smoking cigars, drinking, gambling) then they probably would have mentioned something.

It just happened to be so far out of the realm of possibility that they couldn’t literally nit pick each and every instance of liberty that they assumed was obvious, and write a thousand page Bill of Rights. And even without fathoming how messed up and overbearing the government would become they still managed to write in pretty plain language (of the time, we have since become a less literate nation regardless of how many people can read) a few catchalls against infringements.

The 4th Amendment should protect us from having to provide our papers on demand, it should allow us to go about our business without an oppressive government monitoring every action. The 9th Amendmentpretty much states that , if we don’t specifically state a right, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but we have a limited amount of space on the page. Okay, so they wrote it a bit more eloquently than that but that’s pretty much the gist. Leave it to the passage of time and the twisted minds of revisionists to mess everything up.

But I digress. Cigars. This is just a handful of initiatives that the nanny staters would like to impose, brought to you courtesy of the Cigar Rights of America.

Deface ornate, decorative cigar boxes, often considered an art form with grotesque images;

Ban on cigar events where free cigars (samples) could be available to legal-age adults;

Limits on cigar marketing and advertising;

Imposition of new ‘user fees’ [tax] on cigars, to finance regulations;

Limits on special release and small-batch cigars, due to mandates that cigar blends be submitted to FDA for pre-approval before release;

Limits on nicotine levels on cigars to near zero, severely impacting the flavor of cigars;

Ban on marketing cigar merchandise

If you would replace the word cigar with firearm on most of these you can tell how this is really just a gun control zealots wish list.

Is smoking cigars good for you? Does it have vitamins in it? Will it give you super powers?

No, of course not. But do we really want to live in a country where the state dictates what pursuits and passions we are allowed to indulge? What liberties we are allowed to exercise?

I say hell no. How much must we suffer a Mayor Bloomberg’s dystopian dream of a government who tells you how many calories you are allowed, how big your soda can be, what you can and cannot do in the privacy of your own home etc.

If I want to eat a bloody red steak and wash it down with a cup of bleu cheese then dang it all, that’s my right and Mayor Bloomberg can wait until hell freezes over before I acquiesce to his tyrannical rule and his asinine standards of how I will live my life. Big Gulps 4 Life!!!